Fox News’ closing argument for the final midterm elections of Donald Trump’s political reign is increasingly frantic. The network promised its viewers prosperity. With early voting underway in most states, its best pitch now is footage of burning streets in France.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Fox repeatedly sold Trump’s return to office as the cure for high prices. As economic indicators began to disappoint toward the end of 2025, the network pivoted to promises that 2026 would bring an economic boom. Once again, that prosperity has failed to materialize. Now, with the year nearing its end and Fox’s leading personalities struggling to explain why voters should reward Republicans for their stewardship of the country, the network has changed its pitch: Forget what Republicans promised to do for you. Be terrified of what Democrats will supposedly do to you.

Jesse Watters said the quiet part out loud on “The Five” on Oct. 15. Polling, he explained, shows the MAGA base is engaged and locked in, while “the non-MAGA faction and independents” are where Republicans are exposed. He cited an interview with Caroline Sunshine, a former Disney star turned MAGA operative, who told him the GOP could not simply sell the great stuff Trump had done because accomplishments “don’t motivate.”

“You got to go out and have fear porn,” Watters concluded. “You have to say, ‘These people are going to take your healthcare, they’re going to let in the Third World, they’re going to jack up your taxes,’ and that’s what’s going to get people to come out to vote. You have to say, these people are scary and dangerous.”

His fellow host, Greg Gutfeld, apparently delighted, replied, “Good for you, fear porn!”

Notice whom Watters said he was worried about. MAGA is engaged. It is the “non-MAGA faction and independents” who trouble Republicans — precisely the voters least likely to be persuaded by the insular world of “The Five.” Fox’s fear-mongering is a performance for the converted, intended to escape the studio through Trump’s Truth Social feed and whatever the mainstream press can be induced to cover.

The result is a campaign by the network that has the instability of an advertising operation testing different nightmares. The targets change, but the pitch remains the same. One day it is rioting in France. The next it is a Democratic senator’s comments about prosecuting officials who break the law. Now Fox is turning its cameras toward the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, scrutinizing her family’s movements and encouraging speculation about her whereabouts. The instruction never changes: Your dissatisfaction with the people in power must not become a vote against them.

Sean Hannity has called this “the single most important, consequential midterm election in our lifetime,” warning that Democrats would “shred your Constitution” on behalf of a “radicalized leftist democratic socialist communist movement.” Republicans, Hannity conceded, may be “imperfect” and even “pathetically weak,” but “Democrats are completely insane.” He has also claimed Democrats want to abolish the family and seize control of Americans’ assets, food and healthcare. Laura Ingraham warned Wednesday that Democrats want the public to “submit or be crushed.”

Coincentedally, Fox’s October surprise arrived on cue. What began as student protests over conditions at a high school north of Paris has expanded into a broader protest movement, with large demonstrations across France. Although the overwhelming majority of demonstrators have marched peacefully, scattered violence over the weekend gave Fox the footage it needed. Media Matters tallied at least five hours and 18 minutes of network airtime devoted to the unrest between Saturday and Wednesday morning. Monday alone accounted for two hours and 22 minutes, with the subject raised in every hour of programming from 5 a.m. until midnight.

Ingraham called the footage a “reality check” for anyone who doubts the stakes of the midterms, claiming a Democratic victory would bring the same chaos to the United States. Brian Kilmeade, co-host of “Fox and Friends,” warned viewers that “this type of stuff is coming here.” Hugh Hewitt was even blunter: “It’s coming here.” Kayleigh McEnany, the former Trump press secretary now collecting a Fox paycheck, called the scenes “very instructive” as Americans decide who should lead the country.

The argument presented by Fox hosts was as crude as it was consequential: French unrest became evidence of what American Democrats supposedly intend to unleash at home. The network offered little reason to believe that the political circumstances in France were transferable to the United States. It did not need to establish that connection. It needed viewers to feel it.

Then came the feedback loop that has defined the Trump era. The president, who often posts in real time while watching Fox, declared Sunday morning that “France is burning” and demanded that the U.S. close its borders. By Monday evening, footage of the protests had made its way into his stump speech for embattled Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, where video clips had already been screened for rallygoers. Trump described France as a nation being conquered by migrants, jihadists and communists hostile to Christianity and Western civilization. Democrats, he claimed, wanted to bring the same destruction to America.

House Speaker Mike Johnson joined the pile-on, posting that France was “descending into chaos because they wanted OPEN BORDERS.” POLITICO reported that Republican operatives saw the story as a potential jolt for their campaigns, with party sources saying that linking the perceived anarchy to Democratic policies would be a focus of the GOP’s closing message. Fox News Digital further amplified the narrative by publishing an investigation identifying what it called “a transnational network of communist and socialist organizations” linked to the French movement.

The process is familiar: Fox finds a frightening story, strips it of context and recasts it as a warning about Democrats. Trump amplifies the coverage, giving the story the authority of the presidency. Republican operatives then convert the resulting panic into a campaign message, which Fox can cover as a political development in its own right.

This is a campaign-season ritual. In 2014, the fearmongering centered on Ebola. In 2018, it was migrant caravans. In 2020, the Hunter Biden laptop became an obsession. In 2022, Fox returned to the old-fashioned panic over “America’s crime crisis.” In 2024, it was Kamala Harris being for “they/them.” Each story was presented as an urgent national threat with implications for the election. 

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

This year’s French panic, however, appears to have sputtered. While Trump continued invoking the unrest on the campaign trail, by Wednesday morning Fox’s coverage had fallen sharply. The network was already moving on to its next outrage: days-old comments from Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat and former CIA analyst.

At a University of Chicago event on Oct. 13, Slotkin discussed how Democrats might hold Trump administration officials accountable if they regained power. She said she wanted to pursue significant cases against officials who enabled unlawful conduct and to make prospective employees think carefully about the legal risks of working for the administration.

“I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity,’” Slotkin said. “I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message.”

There is a legitimate debate to be had about how Democrats would exercise investigative and prosecutorial powers if they regain control of Congress, and politicians should be careful not to imply that public servants are presumptively guilty because of whom they work for. But Slotkin’s stated target was officials who enable unlawful conduct, not young conservatives as a class. Her remarks concerned the prospect of legal accountability, not a blanket prohibition on conservative participation in government.

Fox seized on the comments as evidence that Democrats intend to intimidate young conservatives out of public service. Slotkin pushed back, arguing that the Supreme Court’s grant of presidential immunity did not extend to people who commit illegal acts at a president’s direction.

So then the network turned its attention to Omar, exposing just how selective its concern about intimidation can be.

Earlier this month, federal agents searched Omar’s home near Washington under a judicially authorized warrant. Citing unnamed sources, Fox reported that the investigation concerned immigration paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child. The allegations remain allegations; the existence of an investigation does not establish wrongdoing by the congresswoman.

Fox did not merely cover the search. Its reporters were at her door on the morning it happened. On Oct. 20, Fox News Digital published an article centered on Omar’s daughters arriving at the residence. The report described her eldest daughter, Isra Hirsi, pulling into the driveway after dark and carrying a bag into the house.

The headline read, “Omar’s daughters show up at scene of DC raid as rumors swirl about embattled rep’s location.” A promotional post on X asked, “Where is Ilhan Omar?” and explained that the congresswoman had not been spotted publicly since the search and that Fox was “tracking new activity at the residence.” It described her daughters’ arrivals and noted that her husband had continued to appear outside the home.

The framing was unmistakable. Fox was not simply reporting on the status of an investigation. It was inviting viewers to treat the movements of Omar’s family as clues in a mystery, while encouraging speculation about the congresswoman’s whereabouts. One of the daughters, when approached by Fox News Digital, responded with a pointed question: “What’s your problem?”

It is a fair question. The public has a legitimate interest in allegations involving an elected official. That interest does not automatically extend to tracking her children’s movements or turning their arrival at a family home into a political spectacle. Fox’s reporting made the family part of the story without establishing why their ordinary activities were relevant to the investigation.

The episode also exposes the hypocrisy of Fox’s Slotkin coverage. The network wants viewers to believe that Democrats’ talk of accountability will intimidate young conservatives into avoiding public service. Yet its own reporters are making the movements of a Democratic official’s children into content, inviting public harassment and targeting.

Fox’s fixation on Omar has long gone beyond policy criticism. Its personalities have repeatedly invoked her Somali background and Muslim identity to cast her as an alien presence in American politics. Kilmeade recently seized on an account of the congresswoman being disappointed by the homelessness she encountered in New York after arriving in the United States to accuse her of being ungrateful. The implication was that Omar’s criticism of the country was itself evidence of a defective character.

That framing makes the doorstep surveillance more disturbing. Omar is not simply a politician whose positions can be challenged. She is a perpetual outsider whose loyalty is always in question and whose private life is treated as fair game. When Fox’s cameras turn toward her family, the distinction between political journalism and political harassment becomes harder to defend.

The network’s rapid succession of panics reflects the problem at the heart of the Republican campaign. Trump promised to make Americans more prosperous. Fox helped sell that promise. But with voters still confronting the cost of living and increasingly skeptical of the administration’s performance, the network has little incentive to dwell on whether Republicans have delivered. It is far easier to insist that the alternative would be worse.

Fear can be a powerful political tool. But it has limits. It works best when voters have little direct evidence with which to test the claims being made to them. Fox’s message is competing with a reality its audience can see for itself: The economy is not delivering the uncomplicated prosperity Trump promised, and dissatisfaction with the direction of the country is creating opportunities for Democrats.

The network can show its viewers burning streets in France. It can portray a senator’s comments about legal accountability as a threat to an entire generation of conservatives. It can turn a congresswoman’s family into the subject of a lurid guessing game. None of that answers the basic question now facing voters: Have Republicans earned another two years in power?

The post Fox News’ midterm fear mongering grows increasingly desperate appeared first on Salon.com.

When I watched veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl report from the West Bank on a recent Sunday night, my first thought was to wonder how the segment had slipped past the watchful eyes of Bari Weiss. Stahl accompanied a group of Palestinians trying to reach their own land, only to be confronted by Israeli settlers clad in black. The Palestinians had approached the settlers with their hands behind their backs to make plain they posed no threat. One man was headbutted in the face and his nose fractured. An Israeli army captain finally defused the standoff, but the Palestinians never reached their property and the settlers appeared to suffer no consequences. It was a riveting piece of television, framed by the Oct. 27 Israeli elections. 

The report did not slip past Weiss, of course. Within a day, Oliver Darcy of the Status newsletter reported that screenings of the segment had grown extraordinarily contentious, with the CBS News editor-in-chief taking a “very, very hands-on” role and Stahl, who has been at the broadcast since 1991, privately floating the idea of quitting. Darcy’s sources said Weiss’ objections were not confined to a single factual assertion but ranged far more broadly, and that some on the team were unsure the report would even air at all. 

CBS News, for its part, called the Status account a “ludicrous, twisted narrative” and insisted the piece received far fewer edits than most. Perhaps so. But even the network’s version concedes the larger point: A correspondent of Stahl’s stature had to survive an internal fight over an eyewitness account of violence that she and her crew watched unfold.

That contradiction sits at the heart of the Bari Weiss experiment. The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others. As I’ve previously argued, the crisis at CBS News is bigger than one controversial editor. It is about what happens when corporate power no longer values a news organization’s independence as a principle to be defended.

Under the watch of Skydance boss David Ellison and Weiss, whom he handpicked, CBS News’ rightward renovation is running into a problem. The internal revolt at the network has become a daily reality for rank-and-file employees who watched the forced departures of foundational figures like Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The journalists who remain have not all agreed to become instruments of Weiss’ apparent worldview; many are leaking their misgivings to media reporters. Nor do the audience numbers establish that replacing an investigative institution’s identity with a slickly packaged right-wing populist brand constitutes a successful business strategy. Now the network is caught struggling to hold on to the credibility it inherited while forging the political project its leadership appears determined to impose. 

If you want to hear what passes for rigor in Weiss’ newsroom, the tape is available. After Weiss fired London bureau chief Claire Day in April — her offense was apparently coverage of Israel that displeased the new regime — she installed Shayndi Raice as foreign editor. Last week Raice summoned the foreign staff to a virtual meeting and delivered a 15-minute tirade that Status obtained on audio and later released in full. “This is not your publishing platform,” she told the assembled journalists. “This is a company that we all work for, and there’s a hierarchy in place.” Failure to follow that hierarchy, she explained, “is called insubordination, and it’s legal grounds for firing.” 

When Holly Williams, the veteran correspondent whose report on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks had been edited to remove the Palestinian death toll, respectfully challenged her, Raice informed Williams that she had gotten her own story “wrong.” Williams, Raice said, does not know it as well as she does. As for the figure itself — more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — Raice waved it off as a “magic number.” Including it in the report, she suggested, amounted to “posturing” rather than journalism. 

The same partisan thumb has appeared on the scales in CBS’s domestic political coverage. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that Weiss has taken a personal interest in Michigan’s Senate race, and she has pushed CBS journalists to pursue story after story about Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and his supposed sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, raising the subject on editorial calls and tasking the network’s investigative unit with combing his background for a link to the organization. 

The raw material for this enterprise is a 2012 tweet by El-Sayed’s half-sister describing a conversation with their mother about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 1970s. El-Sayed has disavowed the group. He has explained that his parents divorced when he was young and that he was raised by his father and stepmother, and the leap from a mother’s politics in another country half a century ago to a candidate’s secret loyalties is the kind American journalism once required evidence to make.

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

To be fair, El-Sayed is a legitimate story. A Senate candidate’s family history is fair game, and there is nothing inherently scandalous in an editor telling reporters to look into it. The scandal, though, is in the selectivity. The same editor who dispatched investigators after a Democrat on the strength of his mother’s biography also tasked staff with pursuing the theory that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, had secretly checked into a mental health facility during his nine-day absence from the campaign trail, a claim right-wing influencers manufactured out of a bad case of the flu — and one that collapsed on contact with a hospital’s denial and time-stamped security footage. One CBS staffer told Semafor that Weiss’ story ideas “routinely come from social media influencers or from opposition research that’s been placed in conservative outlets,” and that the resulting reports “usually leave out important context and facts.”

It is worth highlighting what unites the targets: El-Sayed and Talarico are both progressives who have criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.

What Weiss is building with her other hand is a stage to platform MAGA. Her signature project is Things That Matter, a town-hall series she devised and launched by interviewing Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, in a December broadcast that drew 1.87 million viewers, which was notably down 11% from what CBS ordinarily draws in that hour. Of the series’ single-guest town halls since, exactly one has featured a Democrat, Maryland Governor Wes Moore. The segment’s latest installment on Saturday handed a Michigan stage to Vice President JD Vance a little over two weeks out from the midterm elections, in a state where the administration needs every vote it can find.

Ironically, the format’s one unscripted moment came from the audience. Joey Amor, whose wife, Master Sgt. Nicole Amor ,was one of six American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike on an outpost in Kuwait in March, asked the vice president when this administration would hold its own officials accountable for the failures that left those troops exposed. Vance pleaded unfamiliarity, explaining that “sometimes information doesn’t filter up to me.” 

The irony was abundant: A town hall designed as a coronation had accidentally produced a news story, and the news was that the vice president of the United States had nothing to say to a man widowed by President Donald Trump’s war of choice.

Now consider what the new CBS has gotten for all this friction. “60 Minutes” recently saw the smallest audience of the season and the smallest for a fourth episode in at least a quarter century. The season premiere in September managed 7.94 million, a 21% drop from 2025 and the weakest opening this century. 

This is a broadcast that grew 9% last season. Nobody was asking Weiss to fix it.

The post Bari Weiss’ pro-MAGA CBS News pivot is falling flat appeared first on Salon.com.

A Crunchwrap Supreme and a bag of supermarket salad generally appeal to rather different notions of a good lunch. One offers the architectural pleasure of a crunchy tostada tucked inside a warm tortilla; the other, the satisfaction of having arranged to eat vegetables without chopping any. This summer, however, both came with a less welcome consideration: iceberg lettuce.

A massive cyclospora outbreak linked to shredded iceberg from Taylor Farms de Mexico prompted recalls extending from Taco Bell kitchens to supermarket produce aisles. Shoppers began trying to determine which seemingly unrelated groceries shared a supplier; someone even made a barcode-scanning app for precisely this purpose. (Such was the broader atmosphere of suspicion that an entirely unsupported rumor about the Trump administration’s promised bargain beef being horse meat eventually inspired online guides for distinguishing one animal from the other.)

It was, in short, Bad Lettuce Summer.

And according to a Gallup poll published October 8, Americans emerged from it considerably more cautious about what they eat. Nearly three-quarters now say they have avoided buying certain foods because of recalls or government advisories, up from 53% in 2024. This newfound vigilance crosses party lines: 81% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans report having taken such precautions.

What it did not produce was much agreement about the people responsible for keeping the lettuce safe.

In 2024, when Joe Biden occupied the White House, 74% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans expressed confidence in federal food-safety oversight. Two years and one change of administration later, those figures stand at 30% and 70%, respectively. 

A 24-point Democratic advantage has become a 40-point Republican one, a remarkable 64-point reversal.

Ahead of the midterms, the findings illustrate a curious feature of American political life: People can encounter the same dangers, take similar precautions and nevertheless arrive at radically different conclusions about the institutions responsible for protecting them. And if there were ever a summer when one might have expected a little consensus about the importance of competent food-safety oversight, surely it was this one.

The outbreak, the largest recorded cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, sickened nearly 13,000 people across 21 states, hospitalizing 570 and killing two. The recall included lettuce served at Taco Bell and Marketside iceberg salad sold at Walmart. Taylor Farms maintained that its own branded salad kits were unaffected, a distinction that mattered scientifically, if not necessarily psychologically, to shoppers eyeing the refrigerated wall of greens.

The trouble with becoming an amateur food-safety inspector is that the job is never quite finished. You can establish that the blueberries in your refrigerator haven’t been recalled, but this tells you remarkably little about the blueberries you’ll purchase next Thursday. You can discover who owns the company that packaged your broccoli, though what to do with that information is another matter. Every new discovery yields a little more knowledge, if not necessarily a corresponding increase in certainty.

---

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

---

There was a policy dimension to this uncertainty, too. In March 2025, the FDA announced plans to delay compliance with its Food Traceability Rule, which requires businesses handling higher-risk foods, including leafy greens, to maintain records that help investigators identify and remove contaminated products more quickly. Originally scheduled for January 2026, the compliance deadline was proposed to be extended to July 2028; Congress subsequently directed the FDA not to enforce the rule before then. The agency said businesses needed additional time to coordinate their systems.

The delay did not cause the summer’s outbreak. Still, there is something peculiar about postponing industry-wide traceability requirements while ordinary shoppers are left scanning their broccoli with smartphones, hoping to learn something useful about where it came from.

During Bad Lettuce Summer, even the official answers required some translation.

In July, the FDA announced that a lettuce sample had tested positive for cyclospora, then corrected the finding as a false positive. Taylor Farms emphasized the correction; federal investigators maintained that their broader epidemiological and traceback evidence still implicated the company’s shredded iceberg. Subsequent environmental testing strengthened that evidence, without conclusively establishing how the contamination occurred.

One could read the competing statements carefully and emerge with some more information, but not much more confidence about dinner.

Then came the political subplot. As the investigation intensified, Taylor Farms representatives met privately with White House officials. The company and its leadership had donated substantial sums to Republican-aligned political groups, including $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, subsequently sought answers about whether the company had attempted to influence the investigation. The White House denied compromising public safety, and no evidence established that political access changed the FDA’s findings.

Still, it is an extraordinary distance to travel from wondering whether the lettuce in your taco is safe to wondering who has the ear of the White House.

The Gallup numbers do not establish why Americans’ confidence has diverged so dramatically. Someone may distrust the industrial food system while enthusiastically supporting an administration promising to reform it. Someone else may have specific objections to that administration’s regulatory decisions. But the speed of the partisan reversal suggests that who runs Washington matters enormously to how Americans evaluate its institutions — though there is a certain irony to this in the age of Make America Healthy Again, which has elevated suspicion of the conventional food system into something approaching a civic virtue.

Its influence has extended all the way to the fast-food fryer: Steak ‘n Shake announced that it had “RFK’d” its French fries by replacing vegetable oil with beef tallow, a development Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. celebrated over burgers and fries during a televised appearance with Sean Hannity. The nation’s health secretary had become a verb, and the French fry a political statement.

It is, admittedly, easier to stage a photo opportunity around a basket of fries than a database of food-traceability records. Both involve questions about what Americans eat, but investigating foodborne illness requires a rather different kind of governmental attention.

Of course, Americans did not suddenly begin losing confidence in food-safety oversight under Trump. 

Gallup found that overall confidence has fallen from 85% in 2004 to just 47% today. And recalls themselves contain an uncomfortable ambiguity: They reveal that something dangerous entered the food supply, but also that someone detected a problem and warned the public. The same event can look like evidence of a system working or a system failing, depending on which part of the story one chooses to emphasize.

With the midterms approaching, that distinction matters. The lawmakers elected in November will have a say in how federal food-safety agencies are funded, scrutinized and held accountable when the next outbreak arrives. Yet Americans are approaching that election with increasingly different assessments of the institutions charged with protecting them, even as their own precautions suggest a broadly shared sense of vulnerability.

The next outbreak, unfortunately, will not wait for everyone to agree on whom to trust.

The post Food safety fears are bipartisan. Trust in oversight isn’t appeared first on Salon.com.

The pre-dawn search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C., home on Monday should have prompted a searching national outcry about presidential power and the weaponization of federal law enforcement for political purposes. Federal agents seized her phone and passport and searched her residence as part of an investigation into allegations dating back to her childhood. Authorities have also issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to her relatives. But instead of treating this escalation as a major test of American democracy, the mainstream media’s editorial response to the breaking news has been sorely lacking. Rather than interrogating the fascistic implications of a president weaponizing federal immigration agencies to threaten political opponents with deportation, major media outlets platformed the administration’s narrative that something fishy must be occurring.

This is not how the American press normally reacts when armed agents of the federal government knock on the door of a prominent political figure. As media watchdog Adam Johnson noted at the Intercept, the very day of the FBI raid against former national security adviser John Bolton brought scathing editorials from the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each newspaper published opinion pieces opposing the raid and leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in POLITICO, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns. 

The asymmetry in the mainstream media’s response to the Omar raid is the story. It is not simply the search itself but the absence of a sustained institutional response to the right’s yearslong campaign targeting the congresswoman that made it possible. For years, the press treated each escalation against Omar as a discrete political controversy rather than examining how the attacks were clearly building toward a confrontation with the federal government. The allegations appeared on right-wing television, circulated through MAGA podcasts and were repeated by administration officials. The investigation was discussed publicly before the search took place. By the time agents arrived at Omar’s home, the political narrative had been prepared. Yet the national conversation too often focused on whether there might be something suspicious about Omar rather than on how the administration had transformed longstanding partisan allegations into a federal investigation.

Right-wing media had agitated for this result for months, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz has documented. In July, Fox News host Sean Hannity told a caller on his radio show that an investigation into Omar was underway. “I can tell you this: There is an investigation going on. I don’t know why it’s being slow-walked,” he said. In September, right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson said he had been hearing “rumblings” about Omar and that Vice President JD Vance had told him on the record that something was about to happen.

The administration was not subtle about what it wanted. In March, Vance said on Johnson’s podcast that “we think Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” and then described the project in plain terms: “That’s the thing that we’re trying to figure out is what are the legal remedies now that we know that she’s committed immigration fraud — how do you go after her, how do you investigate her, how do you actually do the thing, how do you build a case necessary to get some justice for the American people?” In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Johnson there was an “ongoing investigation” into Omar and raised the possibility of deportation, declaring that “something’s going to happen” while stating as fact that Omar “married her brother to try to bring him to the United States.”

But not everyone in the MAGA coalition was satisfied. Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist and internet personality who once traveled to Minneapolis in her own fruitless attempt to prove that Omar had married her brother, fumed after the Mullin interview that the congresswoman was somehow being protected from deportation. Fox host Tomi Lahren was angrier still, devoting much of her Sept. 12 show to accusing Mullin of using Omar’s case as a sideshow to distract from the lack of larger-scale deportations. “If they want to do an investigation, do an investigation,” Lahren said, while also noting that whether Omar married her brother wouldn’t “get people out to vote.” What would, she said, was “promises made, promises kept” — mass deportations.

After Monday’s search, the celebration became even more explicit. Johnson opened his show by asking his audience whether they were excited to send Omar “back to her indigenous peoples” before announcing, “We were right. Forgive us. We’re going to gloat just a bit today.” He called the developments his “crowning achievement for life” and presented the investigation as a victory for his program. Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, reportedly posted “promises made, promises kept” above an article about the search before deleting the post. Even CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s questioning why Omar’s didn’t seek to make a deal with the Biden Justice Department was celebrated by MAGA influencers and right-wing outlets such as Breitbart as evidence that mainstream journalists shared their suspicions. 

The federal inquiry apparently reaches back to 1995, when Omar arrived in the United States as a Somali refugee, and to her naturalization in 2000. The warrant reportedly lists conspiracy, false statements on immigration paperwork and immigration fraud. Officials are examining allegations concerning Omar’s age and her late father’s records. Mullin has also discussed a possible racketeering case, suggesting that a conspiracy theory could connect alleged conduct across different periods. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has said that several investigations involving Omar are underway, including one concerning her financial disclosures.

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

The scope of these inquiries makes independent scrutiny essential. A congressional watchdog previously cleared Omar of wrongdoing in connection with financial disclosures that are now reportedly under examination. The Washington Post has also reported that immigration officials scrutinized similar allegations during Trump’s first term and did not find citizenship-related issues. The administration has not publicly demonstrated why the earlier review was insufficient or what new evidence now justifies the extraordinary escalation. These are precisely the questions that a serious press corps should pursue relentlessly.

This pattern extends beyond Omar. Former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James faced indictments after Trump publicly pressured his attorney general to prosecute them. Both indictments were later dismissed because of a defect involving the appointment of the prosecutor, although the Justice Department subsequently pursued a new indictment against Comey. Former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Fed governor Lisa Cook have faced investigations or other government actions following sustained attacks by Trump. Their cases differ in important respects, but together they raise questions about the relationship between presidential hostility and the exercise of state power.

The consequences of this dynamic extend beyond Omar. When an administration can repeatedly identify enemies, encourage public speculation about their criminality and then launch investigations without facing sustained institutional scrutiny, the boundary between law enforcement and political retaliation becomes harder for the public to discern. The next target may be a different member of Congress, a public official or a naturalized citizen without Omar’s visibility or resources. The danger lies in normalizing a method of governance in which the president’s adversaries are continually placed under suspicion while the administration’s motives receive comparatively little examination.

The press cannot determine the outcome of Omar’s investigation, and it should not prejudge the evidence. But it can insist on transparency where legally possible, investigate the history of the allegations and examine whether officials are adhering to the standards that protect prosecutorial independence. It can also refuse to let the story disappear once the initial spectacle has passed.

Trump’s advantage lies in his ability to make extraordinary actions feel routine. Each failure to examine the cumulative pattern makes the next escalation easier to present as ordinary government business. That is how a media blind spot becomes a political opening. If the media can summon immediate outrage when federal power threatens one political figure but offer only procedural coverage when it threatens another, it risks helping normalize the very abuse it is supposed to expose.

The post The media’s Ilhan Omar blind spot handed Trump an opening appeared first on Salon.com.

Well, that didn’t last too long. Katie Zacharia became White House press secretary just five days ago, but after President Donald Trump told reporters she should “reconsider,” the New York Times reported she’d been fired Friday afternoon. 

Zacharia held the position for less than a week, but generated considerable controversy in that short time. Her first briefing on Tuesday lasted only 14 minutes as she took questions from just three reporters at Breitbart, Fox News and the Daily Mail, appearing flustered and disorganized. Meanwhile, questions about her credentials took center stage, as she identified herself as a lawyer but in fact had never passed the bar exam. Her long history of pushing far-right conspiracy theories like QAnon also resurfaced. 

Then, Zacharia made two appearances on Fox News, both of which did not seem to go well. Sean Hannity grilled her on her false credentials Thursday night and told her, “I can give you some unsolicited advice. That’s never going to be a friendly room to you,” referring to the White House press pool. The next morning, she appeared on “Fox and Friends” and was asked if she still had the “confidence” of the president. “I-I-I’m standing here and I was able to travel with him through all of the midterm convention — or, excuse me — the midterm rallies, and I hope to be able to build the trust and confidence of everyone around me,” she replied.

---

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

---

Apparently, she did not have Trump’s confidence. Speaking to reporters at the White House Friday, the president said he told her “Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider.” He added that he would leave the decision to her, according to CNN, but said they would speak when he returned to the White House. “Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this,” he said he told her. A few hours later, she was out. 

Numerous people online compared Zacharia’s short tenure was compared to Anthony Scaramucci, who was appointed White House Communications Director in 2017 during Trump’s first term, but just lasted 11 days. “To put it more precisely: a Zacharia is about .4 of a Scaramucci,” Anna Bower, a senior editor at Lawfare, posted on Blue Sky. The Mooch, as Scaramucci is popularly known, posted on X that “Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”

Zacharia replaced secretary Karoline Leavitt, who resigned from the position in August.

😳 Zacharia flames out on Fox News for the second time in 12 hours 😳

With the wreckage still smoldering from her debacle on Hannity, Katie went on Fox & Friends and received another grilling from Fox hosts

LAWRENCE JONES: It’s been a tough week for you. Do you wish you would’ve disclosed to the president about not passing the bar?

ZACHARIA: Those questions weren’t asked

Here’s the whole segment:

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 16, 2026

The post Katie Zacharia was too incompetent even for Trump appeared first on Salon.com.

For the past month, Texas state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton had been competing on roughly equal footing in public attention. The two candidates in what is perhaps the country’s marquee Senate race were being searched for at about the same clip, which is what you would expect of a competitive contest in a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide in decades. Then right-wing influencers invented a story that Talarico had secretly checked into an Ohio psychiatric facility, and the search traffic around the Democrat exploded. The lie collapsed with almost embarrassing speed, and the people who spread it now face potential legal exposure. 

But its political purpose was achieved anyway. By the time the story fell apart, the damage had already been done: A candidate’s health had become a national political spectacle, a social media feeding frenzy had swallowed the news cycle and a Republican politician facing serious questions about his own conduct had been handed a convenient distraction.

This is what Talarico calls the “rage economy.” At a CNN town hall on Wednesday, he described a system in which conspiracy theorists collect clicks, social media platform owners collect profits and the public gets angrier without becoming any better equipped to solve the country’s problems. The Talarico hoax shows exactly how MAGA media governs the information war. While we watched a fake scandal implode, a very real one centering on Paxton slipped by.

The episode began when Talarico spent nine days off the campaign trail recovering from a bout of the flu. There was never any genuine mystery about his whereabouts. He had appeared virtually at an event in early October to inform attendees that he had come down with the illness. But Paxton saw an opening and used it. The attorney general demanded “proof of life” and set up a tip line for information about his opponent’s whereabouts. He led a “Where is James Talarico?” chant at a rally. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “James TalaFREAKo” was “MISSING IN ACTION.”

MAGA influencers filled in the innuendo with the cruelest narrative. Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt claimed to have sources who said Talarico was in a psychiatric facility. By Sunday afternoon, the rumor had acquired its supposed smoking gun. Nick Sortor, a conservative influencer known for filming scuffles outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, and Rhein Amacher, a self-described “right-wing provocateur,” claimed that an employee at the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, had confirmed that Talarico was discharged that evening. Sortor posted a short audio clip, and Elon Musk amplified the claim repeatedly from his account. Within hours, the story had spread across X with millions of views. According to the reporting cited in Talarico’s own account of the episode, 50 accounts pushed the claim within 20 minutes and those posts accumulated 9.3 million views. One account posted the same text 83 times in under two hours.

The problem was that the “proof” was not proof. The full recording, obtained by The Bulwark, revealed that the person on the phone repeatedly denied that anyone named James Talarico was in the hospital system. The candidate said he had never even been to Ohio. The timeline was equally impossible: Amacher said he made the calls on Saturday evening, but Talarico had already appeared at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Friday and attended a Kacey Musgraves concert the next day. He could not have been discharged from an Ohio psychiatric facility on Saturday because he was visibly back in Texas. By Sunday evening, the hospital itself issued a flat public denial that Talarico had never been a patient.

Naturally, the self-correcting mechanism of truth did not immediately penetrate the right-wing ecosystem. Musk had already supercharged the claim. The falsehood had been viewed millions of times before the correction arrived. Right-wing media figures like Megyn Kelly continued demanding answers even after the hospital issued its official rebuttal, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller kept conspiracy-posting long after The New York Times reviewed and reported on time-stamped security images proving Talarico was safely at his home in Austin during the disputed window of time.

The initial burst also illustrates how a relatively small number of high-profile accounts can set the agenda for a much larger audience. This is the difference between an information ecosystem that rewards accuracy and one that rewards attention. In the former, a claim becomes more credible as evidence accumulates. In the latter, a claim can become more influential simply because more people have seen it. The only people who benefit from a manufactured outrage are the people selling it and the politicians who can hide behind it.

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

And hide is precisely what Paxton needed to do. On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that only days after being indicted for embezzlement, a fugitive donated $25,000 to the attorney general. The paper also reported that Paxton rang in 2025 at a New Year’s party in Dubai attended by two men federal prosecutors had indicted for allegedly embezzling millions from an Illinois hospital. One of those men was Anosh Ahmed, who according to records from the Texas Ethics Commission, gave Paxton $190,000 between 2022 and 2024. 

These are the kinds of facts that, in a normal campaign, would dominate the week. A sitting state attorney general taking money from people accused of looting a hospital is a story about who he works for — a man accused of being a criminal or the people of Texas. Instead, it was buried under a fabricated tale about his opponent’s mental health.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Paxton personally scripted the Ohio hoax. I am saying something that does not require a conspiracy at all. The right has built an incentive structure in which the people with the biggest megaphones are rewarded for flinging dirt and are never penalized when it turns out to be false. Paxton’s own conduct fits that structure like a glove. He fueled the “Talarico is missing” narrative from the stage and through his tip line. He benefited when the fog rolled in. The MAGA influencer ecosystem did the rest. Nobody had to give an order.

Consider also the broader pattern of the attacks on Talarico. A pro-Paxton super PAC ran an ad that placed the Democrat’s face on a cutout in a dress. Allies of Trump have spent months insinuating that Talarico is somehow insufficiently masculine, that he is “beta,” that he is unmarried and that questions about his sexuality are fair game. At a Wednesday rally for Paxton in Tyler, Texas, Vice President JD Vance openly suggested that Talarico is gay. Republicans have even attempted to other him through food, calling him a vegan. (He is not.) Taken together, the mental hospital hoax belongs to the same family of attacks. It is an attempt to make a candidate seem strange and unfit through innuendo because the substance of his message is hard to rebut. A candidate who talks about food and gas prices and community is difficult to caricature as a threat. So MAGA media built a caricature — Talafreako — instead.

Some of it deserves laughter. A man tricking a hospital receptionist is not exactly a criminal mastermind. But the stupidity is the tell, not the excuse. MAGA media do not need smart lies anymore. They need fast ones, repeated at volume across a captured platform and timed to drown out real reporting about real corruption. 

Earlier fiascos like Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Jack Smith flop should have taught them caution. Instead the right has learned from Trump that there is no penalty for being wrong in public — as long as you are wrong at scale and never look back.

The post A viral Talarico hoax drowned out Paxton’s corruption story appeared first on Salon.com.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi always said that the only way for Democrats to win elections was to focus on the proverbial “kitchen table issues.” As the leader of the caucus for 20 years, she had quite a track record, presiding over quite a few big wins and many small ones, so she knew what she was talking about. According to her way of thinking, people are motivated to vote over concerns about their own material well-being, and in recent years, this has meant healthcare, job security and the cost of living — the basics.

Republicans, by contrast, tend to rely on a broader appeal to security in general. “Law and order” has been their bumper sticker, covering a wide range of free-floating anxieties in American society having to do with cultural changes, race and the loss of status of straight white males. Their answer to economic stress comes down to blaming the bogeyman of the day, whether it’s immigrants or the deficit, and the answer is always tax cuts and more tax cuts. 

Democrats have usually been trusted more on the kitchen-table issues, depending on whether they happen to be in office when some kind of economic crisis hits. Jimmy Carter paid a high price, losing his 1980 re-election bid after having inherited crippling stagflation from his GOP predecessors, and was hit with a big recession as a result of the Federal Reserve policies — which he supported — to break it. His successor, Ronald Reagan, reaped the benefit, a common consequence of painful Democratic policies necessarily deployed to clean up a Republican administration’s economic mess.

The GOP enjoyed 12 years in the White House after Carter’s loss, including a big boom which inevitably turned into a recession and helped ensure Bill Clinton’s victory over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election. Clinton presided over an economic boom that saved his presidency, which was otherwise dogged by scandals largely perpetrated by the GOP’s final evolution from the party of mainline Protestants and main street business owners to one of ruthless street-fighters.

Economics, of course, aren’t the only issue that motivates voters. While more abstract notions of foreign policy and national security are rarely at the top of the agenda, war certainly can be. George W. Bush learned this in 2006, when the American people finally realized the Iraq war was a disaster. But something else was looming on the horizon. Bush had also made the fatal mistake of trying to privatize Social Security, breaking whatever trust people had in Republicans to safeguard their hard-won benefits. The Democrats won the midterm election in a rout.

Two years later, Barack Obama was hit with a double whammy. The war in Iraq was still the top issue, but at the height of his campaign against Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, the bottom fell out of the housing market and the world suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the same time, the healthcare crisis had reached a crescendo, with millions of people going bankrupt, and many suffering and dying due to the high price of insurance. After his win, those kitchen-table issues were front and center in shaping Obama’s presidency. In fact, two years into his first term, as the Great Recession continued to drag on, the American people let out the equivalent of a political primal scream and gave Democrats what Obama famously admitted was a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms. Perversely, this was largely caused by the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the party’s healthcare plan, underscoring that no good deed goes unpunished.

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

Then came Donald Trump. When he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, the economy was on the upswing, and just enough people were gulled by his phony reputation as a great businessman and promises to make everyone rich that he eked out an Electoral College win. Once in office, Trump basically just rode the recovery that was already underway and took credit for it. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and his incompetence fully manifested itself, voters turned against him. If there was ever a kitchen-table issue, the pandemic was it: We were all stuck sitting around the table for months, wondering if the world was ever going to be the same. Trump failed to rise to the occasion.

But he was elected again after Joe Biden presided over the pandemic’s economic recovery, which was painful, ushering in inflation for the first time in decades to a chunk of a population that had never experienced it. The issue did him — and his vice president, Kamala Harris, who replaced him on the ticket — in, returning Trump to the White House on the promise that he would restore the economy to the alleged golden age of his first term. Unfortunately for America and the world, enough people bought into Trump’s chicanery once again, and here we are today in a crisis of chaos, mistrust, incompetence and despair over the radical policies wrought by a second Trump administration. 

Kitchen-table issues are still at the top of most voters’ lists. The cost of living remains high and keeps climbing. Housing is out of control, and gas prices are through the roof due to Trump’s war of choice with Iran. His much-ballyhooed tariffs have helped keep inflation high, and there is now little doubt what is driving the polls showing that Republicans are about to take a drubbing in the November midterms. 

But the concept of kitchen-table issues has its limits. Not everything in life is actually about money, and people’s perceptions of the economy are often colored by other issues that don’t appear at first glance to be directly related. Bush’s losses in 2006, for instance, were affected by his mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, both of which contributed to a sense that the administration suffered from hubris and incompetence. There is little doubt that the backlash against Obama during his first term was also driven by the recoil on the right to his identity as the first Black president. Trump likewise benefited from the fact that misogyny and racism were in play in his victories over the first two women to win the nominations of a major party.

The problem is that Democrats have too often relied solely on the kitchen-table issue agenda and failed to address underlying anxieties that contribute to their distress. And with Donald Trump, they are legion. 

The unrelenting pandemonium of his presidency, from his brutal immigration crackdown to the flagrant corruption and degeneration of the president himself, as manifested in his obsession with gold and the building of personal monuments in a time of economic stress, is making the public depressed and angry. The fact that Trump broke one of his fundamental promises to not get the country into a war, as he whines constantly about being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, is maddening. His ongoing disregard of the rule of law and the assault on the democratic process are obvious. The disconnect between what average Americans are feeling and the way their leaders are behaving is a mile wide.

People have been yearning for a holistic explanation for this chaos and confusion — and Democrats have finally found a way to express it. As POLITICO recently noted, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, along with Senate candidates Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas, as different as they are individually, are “leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.”

The corruption argument is compelling. Beyond the hated war in Iran (and its resulting gas prices), Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and old friend Steve Witkoff’s deals in the Middle East have come under scrutiny and outrage, as have the government contracts being handed out to companies in which Trump’s sons are invested. Pardons are being sold to anyone with enough cash, some of them to people convicted of healthcare fraud, even as the Republicans are cutting Medicaid and healthcare subsidies. Contrary to his blarney, Trump’s Louis XIV-style monuments to himself are being largely paid for by the taxpayers. On top of all that, there are the reports that Trump has made $2 billion since returning to the White House, a figure that is excessive, even for him. 

The shameless grifting is too obvious for voters to overlook, and the Democrats have finally realized that the critique of Trump and MAGA Republicans must go beyond the kitchen table because it is all connected. The chaos, incompetence, deceit and self-dealing are at the heart of America’s distress, and it’s benefiting Trump and his cronies at the expense of average taxpayers. 

Distilling all this into a media-ready indictment, a soundbite, is difficult, but “Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans” is about as good as it gets. Let’s hope Democrats can carry this message of reform past Election Day and actually do something about it.

The post Democrats have discovered the key to midterm victory appeared first on Salon.com.